NZ’s Horomona Horo… a big guy with big tattoos and big music, written in the ancient tradition of Māori people.

Haydn Ensemble leader, violinist Skye McIntosh… the thunderous sounds of Haydn’s “The Creation” will open the festival. Photo: Helen White NZ’s Horomona

Classical Persian music performer, Iranian-born Gelareh Pour… “a voice that touches the heart”, will sing in a concert about women in Afghanistan called “A Hidden World”.

DIRECTOR of the Canberra International Music Festival Roland Peelman is known as a canny programmer, but he’s outdone himself this time with the festive title of “Pole to Pole” and unless he’s planning a foray into outer space, that covers most contingencies.

“I had been looking to design a festival around nature, what’s happening with our planet,” Peelman tells me.

“Of course, I’m not designing a climate-action festival,” he says. “It’s a music festival and I don’t want to score cheap political points, but I thought the idea of music and poles would give me something to think about.

“The expression ‘Pole to Pole’ means a lot of things, we go to a lot of places, including Antarctica, but in normal idiom refers to going from one extreme to another – it’s a fantastic formula where you can find what you want.

“Musicians have different sentiments, so in any festival we also need to cover a big range, we need tragedy, comedy and laughter.”

It also means one extreme to another in a geographical way – a journey around the world for instance, or across the great trading routes.

“Closer to home it means the great track that leads us from the mountains to the sea, seen in our signature project called ‘The Bundian Way’,” he says.

That’s based on the seminal book by John Blay, who’ll read from it at the festival, which follows the 360-kilometre Aboriginal pathway between Mount Kosciuszko and Twofold Bay.

“It gave us an opportunity to delve into the story of the early pastoralists and the indigenous people who have been walking that track in order to come together to feast on Bogong moths,” he says.

Immediately it struck him that two of the festival regulars, violinist Erica Avery and composer Brenda Gifford, have origins in the Yuin people, so it seemed only fitting to involve them, along with other indigenous artists, composer Kate Neal and author Blay in concerts on May 7 and 8.

“If we talk about polar extremes, there’s NZ’s Horomona Horo, a big guy with big tattoos and big music, written in the ancient tradition of Māori people,” he says. 

Horo will perform on Māori instruments at Parliament House and with the NZ String Quartet, in a concert on May 1 at the Fitters’ Workshop, “Kia Ora Kiwi”. 

The NZ component not only sees the striking presence of Horo with the quartet, but has had Peelman reaching out to NZ during the covid crisis and finding “an extraordinary amount of activity, especially compositional, a lot of wonderful music and a lot of variety”.

Not everybody who comes from NZ is called Mackenzie or McGrath, he quips and other NZ stars include baritone James Ioelu and Japanese-NZ marimba player Naoto Segawa.

Far away from Aotearoa is the world of classical Persian music, as Iranian-born artist, Gelareh Pour – “a voice that touches the heart”, Peelman says – sings in a concert about women in Afghanistan at the NGA called “A Hidden World.” 

The basis of the concert is Gemma Peacocke’s “Waves & Lines”, a multimedia song cycle for soprano, electronics and chamber ensemble based on a tradition of Afghan women’s folk poetry, and followed by a panel forum. 

Worlds away are the musicians of the Haydn Ensemble, led by violinist Skye McIntosh, who follow an informed practice to celebrate and recreate Haydn from a time Britannia ruled the waves.

With that in mind – and Peelman is quick to assert that he has no intention of deserting classical music in his search for polar opposites – the thunderous sounds of Haydn’s “The Creation” will open the festival, cast with singers from Australia and NZ, and featuring the full force of the Haydn Ensemble.

“The traditional concerts in our festival will never go away, but they walk hand-in-hand with other traditions,” Peelman says, praising the very senior audiences who flock to the festival each year as “up for anything”.

But Peelman is never too far from his idea of the natural world and says, “I meant it when I said it would be about the natural world, there’s a lot about nature.” 

On April 30, for instance, there’s a concert for dogs in Haig Park in the morning, catering to sensitive ears.

Then on May 5 at the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture in “Birds in Paradise”, there’ll be both human and avian music in what he calls “a concert by birds, their human followers and divine devotees,” followed the next day by tenor Andrew Goodwin and violinist Kristian Winther in “An English Lark”.

After a quick visit to Pollock’s “Blue Poles”, where Matthew Doyle plays the didgeridoo, the festival will finish with a concert “The Last Mile”, in which satirist Jonathan Biggins performs his own words to Saint-Saens’ “The Carnival of the Animals” – “That’s the fun part,” Peelman says. 

Canberra International Music Festival, April 29-May 8. Book at cimf.org.au